


|so short is life's flutter|

by littlekaracan



Category: Ranger's Apprentice - John Flanagan
Genre: Angst, Gen, also a club briefly drags flesh, but ending is uhh, desc. of snapping necks breaking legs and stabbing, god the poor bandit dude really has the stupidest name ever huh, if you get yucky around blood you should probably think twice before reading, it's the thorgan fic, like a lot, like yall know they both survive anyways so this is a win win situation, lots of blood, not....... bad?, of blood, pools of blood, stuff like that, there's a lot of blood, when i say 'blood' i mean like
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-11
Updated: 2019-07-11
Packaged: 2020-06-26 15:21:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19771003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlekaracan/pseuds/littlekaracan
Summary: “We’re alive,” Halt says, and it takes him a second to recognize that his voice is too silent to really be his, too. It’s barely more than whispering. “We’ll be fine.”Crowley, however, doesn’t look convinced.His eyes look straight through Halt for a second, then shift to the side. Very, very deliberately. They’re frantic, and they carry a message he can’t say out loud.Halt’s stomach drops as Crowley, although unable to summon his voice again, simply mouths,Behind you.





	|so short is life's flutter|

**Author's Note:**

> so i literally couldnt get this crap out my head ever since halt's peril. flonky is so good at writing emotion in short explanations but he never expands on it so i'm just gonna have to write this shit myself i guess
> 
> also if you didn't read the tags for some reason, this is RICH with violence. stab wounds, broken bones, blood, the usual. this has more violence than feelings. i tend to stick with 'ayyy here some feelsies' but i was watching multiple videos of a man breaking his whole leg for this fic so you might... yknow... not wanna go through this one if that sorta thing makes ya a little uncomfy. stay safe!

He runs. He runs, and not much can stop him, not the tree roots or the roads he's long-abandoned for the side tracks, not the aching helplessness in his chest or the terror of hearing screaming voices echo through the woods.

_Crowley, Crowley, Crowley, Crowley..._

He turns and he jolts and he moves with the shadows of the trees and the red evening light reflecting off the leaves. He runs and he stumbles over boulders and tree bark and his leg is not facing exactly the right way but he doesn't feel it, he listens and he hears, the clashing of metal and the cries of men. It's multiple voices and it's hard to tell them apart, it's hard to say who's barking orders and who's wailing in pain and it only sparks a bigger fire under his feet.

He runs and he turns and he falls, and he feels like the horror will make him sick but the uncertainty will make him sicker _\- which way, which way, which-_

And there's the prolonged silence and then a cry, and this one's familiar, this one's for him, this one's his name, his name, _Halt_ , he's calling—

Halt knows. He knows where to go, he knows it's urgent, he knows that if he doesn't get there in time Crowley isn't making it out. _How. How. How. We had it planned. This wasn't supposed to happen. This was not supposed to happen._

His leg twists again and he holds onto a branch just in time, freezing in place right before the clearing where the voice is coming from. He stares through the thick veil of the forest leaves; as his eyes get used to the relative dim light, his heart drops to his stomach.

Red hair and red blood, coloured nearly the same. Crowley and four men – no, it is five. It was five, but one is very much dead on the grass, and another's shoulder is strangely displaced, like a chunk of meat is missing from the muscle.

Crowley does not look good, he thinks to himself in the small time window it takes for him to aim a throwing knife. His cloak is bloodied, his hands are bruised and his face has more blue and red than his dotted pale skin. Even from his hideout Halt spots a black eye and a stream of blood rolling slowly over his cheek and dripping down from his chin.

Then, the throwing knife spins off his hand; a mere blink after throwing it, Halt knows his aim didn't fail him.

With a smooth _thwack_ one of the uninjured bandits hits the grass.

He doesn’t even let out a sound before he collapses into a carpet of red Halt would never wish upon any good man. But these are not good men, and they are not seeing him yet, cloaked in the fog of the forest and the darkness of the woods, and he is not planning on letting that advantage go to waste. With light feet and a heavy head, he leaps and he lands just behind them, the weight of a ready bow bringing him to his knees, but not for long – the free arrow flies, and only the surprise saves the man’s life as he jolts instinctively. The arrow nails down his shoulder either way, and he cries out in pain – unfortunately, Halt finds, he is not protected by the woods anymore. The two other men only take one glance at him to deem him the main threat, and, for a second, it is a relief, as they’re stepping away from Crowley whose legs had given in and brought him down in a daze. Halt breathes that relief out – and it’s flown and gone, because the two men are upon him.

He would draw his bow, he knows he wouldn’t miss with it, the arrows dancing between his fingers would fly out to kill, but they’re approaching too fast and moving too unpredictably, and, following an instinct, Halt chucks the bow away to reach for his seax instead.

It reflects the sunlight that manages to squeeze through the treetops, and Halt gets only a second to take a single breath before they’re right in front of him.

He knows his knife is deadlier in his hands than in any other’s, he knows – his knife serves him and only him, and it sure as hell feels like it knows that as well. The handle is cool and his hand is warmer, and he keeps the blade low and his head high as the men jump at him.

They’re agile and they’re red-faced with rage, and Halt hopes their anger works to his advantage, not really thinking about how hot the blood in his own veins boils. They took down Crowley, they took down the Commander and they took down Halt’s friend, and it’s only because of the intense training that the seax doesn’t shake in his own hand, melting in all-devouring fury.

The men have weapons, proper weapons, one with a sword and another with a slim club. His trained eye notices the strain on the dislocated shoulder – that man is the one who holds the club, and he struggles.

Halt will use that.

Firstly, he freezes for a moment – clubs don’t currently do his safety instincts justice, but this man is not Thorgan. Rather just an imposter with a smaller club. It is just a man.

His moment of hesitation doesn’t help avoid the sword coming from the other side, and it cleanly cuts his side – only his side, because he flinched away from it at the last second. Yet it still stings like hell, but he doesn’t cover it. _No time._

The swordsman looks stunned for a second – granted, most people don’t avoid a blade in time, but most people aren’t Rangers either, and most people also aren’t fuelled by all-seeing hatred to the murderers who knocked down their best friend.

Halt only needs this second of his shock. Only one. Hearing the club whistling through the air behind him, he leaps forward, right to the sword. He ducks under it and pushes the blade away with his own – metal screeches as steel drags onto itself. Again, the man’s eyes grow wide. Most knives don’t deflect swords.

And what most can’t do, Rangers can, apparently.

Without hesitation, Halt slashes the man’s wrist. He howls in pain as the sword slips through his fingers, nearly deafening the tiny Ranger whose face twists merely a few centimetres away from his.

The club crashes into his shoulder.

Halt feels something crack in him, but he doesn’t have enough time to think whether it felt serious enough or not. As he falls to his knees, a plan arises. Halt reckons he always has a plan, even when it’s forged in desperation.

Before he gets hit again, he latches onto the sleeve of the man in front of him – the man with the sword, but not anymore – and, with his free hand, stabs the knife right through his stomach, tearing it out nearly immediately and letting him fall backward, despite Halt feeling like he didn’t go deep enough.

_You’re the only one left_ , Halt would say to the owner of the slim war club, but his voice is gone. _You won’t be, soon_.

He stands. He stands, because the bandit seems hypnotized by the string of red draped over Halt’s seax - how lucky that Halt knows not to look down. Black blood can get a man staring like nothing else.

He wastes no more time, he can’t afford to. With a shaky breath, he dives forward again, and the man puts out his club.

A club is heavy, and Halt is not – he avoids and he avoids and he avoids because he can’t block it, he avoids in an attempt to get closer because a knife is not a club, and he can’t just swing it without losing it. Halt never wanted more than his knife and his bow, but he finds himself wishing for something a little longer just this once so he wouldn’t get cut up into bleeding pieces and crushed into a meat pie.

Thankfully, the man is not bright enough to know exactly how proud of their weaponry Rangers are, and how comfortably the handle rests in Halt’s hand.

As Halt inevitably dives closer and closer, he notices the man is raising the club too high and swishing it with ease but no control, and it leaves room for his knife. He spins and the blade spins with him, and he aims for the man’s arm.

The bandit sees it – and, in equal parts of brilliance and overwhelming stupidity, flings the club to the side and drops it so he can move out of Halt’s way in time, and, although it saves his arm, Halt ducks under and manages to somewhat kick the club farther away, although it doesn’t help his leg.

For a moment, he’s only a couple of inches away from the man’s face, and he holds the knife but he feels it stiff in his palm – somehow, before he can use it, they’ve pushed each other away, and Halt loses the closeness he’d won.

The new distance, however, leaves enough space for him to notice movement in the corner of his eye.

He sees the man with the arrow – the arrow that Halt put though him – alive, apparently, and attempting to draw his bow. He sees easily that it will not work, and it was a stupid plan to begin with, but, unexplainably, he boils over the second the man’s fingers touch the bowstring, his blood rushes to his head and he hears the leaves rustling in front of him as the first man takes a step back.

_Leave my fucking bow where I put it_.

Somehow, perhaps having distracted the bandit in front with his own wandering glance, Halt realizes his side is unprotected and gladly drives his knee in, knocking the wind out of his lungs. He gasps right by Halt’s ear, and he shoves him off – the man stumbles but seems more or less fine, but Halt can’t afford to look at him now. He turns, and, in an act of similarly groundbreaking stupidity, throws his seax like the smaller knife toward the bandit leaning over his bow.

To his overwhelming surprise, the knife hits. Not only does it hit, it cuts right into the neck and stays as he convulses and attempts to reach for it – of course, to no avail. But Halt does not get the chance to see him fall over – the man he shoved away had caught up to him and driven his shoulder right into Halt’s chest. It’s his turn to stumble backward, and he swears he sees white all around him as he hits the ground underneath, but there’s no time to think. There’s only time to act.

He rolls to the side nearly on sheer instinct, and it saves his life as the man cuts right into the ground where his neck had been a second ago. Halt senses the wave of air by his head, it pulls on his hair as he shoots up and from his position.

As he stands, however, he realizes the hit didn’t do much good for his head – the forest spins and spins, and the only reason Halt doesn’t fall then and there is because he spins along with it – turning on his heel, he jabs his leg to the collarbone of the still-crouching bandit.

It takes him half-a-second to know he missed and that it ruined him. Not so much of a miss on his part, really, but the man turns as well and his chest is blocked by his shoulder – Halt does knock him away and on his back with a yelp, but he not so much sees as he feels his leg twisting.

The impact pushes him back too, but he makes the mistake of putting his weight on the untested leg, and it immediately fails him, forcing him down. A strangled noise rips through his teeth as he manages to keep himself from grabbing onto it. _No time, there’s no time, wait, wait, wait—_

He rises on one knee and moves the other, hooking his foot behind the man’s ankle and forcing him down as well.

Here his whole body fails him, and sharp pain shoots up his calf, overwhelming – he throws his head back in attempt not to cry out, and it gives the man enough time to crawl up on him and try to wrap his hands around his neck.

Halt coughs – he coughs, twists the man’s wrist with odd ease and grabs him by the collar.

_Oh, this will not be pleasant._

He doesn’t breathe, he doesn’t feel his own heartbeat, only the shirt in his fists, and he pulls the man forward, onto himself, and quirks up on instinct, bashing their heads together.

Halt doesn’t feel the pain at first, only how the man’s whole body seems to shoot away from him as his blood on his forehead mixes with Halt’s. He lets go of the shirt and tries to breathe, but his throat strangles him, and he only manages to reach up and touch his head, exactly where they’d collided with Halt’s last attempt to knock him off, even if it meant using his nose as a punching bag.

There’s little blood, but that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt.

The man lies motionless – Halt hopes he’s dead. He hopes he’ll stay down.

But his fingers twitch.

By now, there’s nothing else on Halt’s mind.

He drags himself up, kneels, lurches over to the man almost like a leaping cat, presses him down with his leg and grabs his head.

Then Halt snaps his neck.

A loud crack echoes through the clearing, but he feels it more than hears it.

_It’s done_ , something in him says _. It’s done._

_It’s over._

He can’t stand, but he must.

He can’t.

He has to.

So he does.

He stands, and he knows he’s going to limp and he’s going to limp _hard_ , but he doesn’t care now – now, there’s Crowley somewhere there, bleeding and hurt and possibly dying, and cold dread twists in his gut again.

_Crowley, Crowley, Crowley..._

He turns – barely, barely, he barely moves, but his head is in flames and his eyes could burn through the gates of hell itself, but as he steps toward Crowley, a swordsman blocks his path.

_Are you fucking kidding me?_

In a beat, there are a thousand thoughts going through his head, from frustration to cold fury.

Most of all, surprise.

Halt has to bow his head to recognize the enemy – it’s the same man he stabbed in the stomach, no mistaking it, but the hand on his side looks more like a conscious choice than the death grip of an injured man, and Halt curses himself in all the worst ways he can muster up. He couldn’t have missed – how did he miss? He should’ve driven it into his flesh to the hilt, he should’ve gone with his gut. How could he manage to miss all the lethal spots, even when he leaped up to put that blade in him? He couldn’t see straight, perhaps, but that’s not an excuse for a Ranger. He missed, and he missed so, so hard.

The wretched survivor stands tall and he holds an ax – where’d he get it? It wasn’t there before. Perhaps he’d run off to get it, but Halt would never forgive himself at all if he thought he let him get away for enough time.

He would tell him to go. He would tell him to piss off and die somewhere else, to fall in a ditch or to run and hope he never sees a Ranger again. He would abandon his own surfacing bloodthirst in favour of getting to Crowley sooner.

There is only one problem – the man stands in front of both Crowley and Halt. No, not in front, he stands between them, effectively preventing Halt from even seeing if Crowley’s chest is rising at all. He can only see the tousled red head with the same red carpet of blood underneath, and it makes Halt’s stomach twist – Crowley isn’t moving at all. Crowley’s always moving, always jerking and jumping around here and there. He’s too still. He’s too _still_.

And the man in front of him is trying to keep Halt away.

Perhaps he let him off once, perhaps he broke the most important rule of never missing a shot or a hit, but Halt was anything if not self-developing. He would not miss now, not now and not _ever again_.

The bandit sees the Ranger in front of him seemingly tense up, as if he was bracing for a hit. The Ranger looks up with dark dark eyes – and raises a hand.

Halt smiles. He doesn’t know why, he just does, and if he could move more muscles, he would’ve started laughing, too. He smiles so widely his lips feel like they’re going to tear away from each other, but he feels that, strangely, even if he wanted to, he couldn’t stop.

The raised hand moves, and one finger beckons the bandit closer. _Come on_. Like a child. Just like some stupid child.

The condescension does the trick, and, white-minded, the man lurches for him in a feverish daze.

He can’t take the bandit head on. His leg feels like it’s been mangled into mash, and his chest’s no better. But the man is large – large enough for Halt to know exactly when to leap to the side. He does, and the man does not change his course in time. He cannot.

The forest spins again, and Halt’s on the ground now, but it’s his plan. It’s always his plan, even if it isn’t. If he didn’t have a plan, he would not make it in time.

He doesn’t see the man trip on his foot, but he feels the force completely crushing his leg. It hurts. It hurts, but he can’t react to it, because he doesn’t give himself a chance. He doesn’t want to think what would’ve happened if he didn’t have the man trip over him, and so he does not, because the glimmer of a knife in the bandit’s hand catches his eye.

It’s his knife, he realizes. His throwing knife, the one he took down the first one with. The man pulled it out of his companion’s body. It disgusts him. The browning blood on the handle disgusts him, and the man, and the fact that it’s _his knife_. All of it, disgusts him.

He remembers the bulging eyes of the one that tried to aim his own bow against him. _You won’t learn_.

He knows he is going to scream out if he moves now, but dignity is not more important than speed, and so he shoots up and lunges for the man’s hand, for the knife. He doesn’t hear himself. He doesn’t need to. He only feels his throat going sore.

The leg is not as useless as he thought after all - he pins the bandit down with it, and rips the knife out of his hand.

Then there’s no thinking. No time for thinking and no time for reason.

He drives the steel over the shoulder blades and into the back of the neck. Just below the hairline. It goes straight through, nailing the bandit to the ground. It’s awfully familiar, and, although he doesn’t like it one bit, although he’d love to leave the knife in, he pulls it out, moving out of blood’s way – and books it.

He doesn’t know if he runs or stumbles – they’re one and the same, at that point. But he knows he’s still holding the bloody knife when he falls by Crowley, and promptly drops it onto the forest floor.

He has to physically drag Crowley’s body closer to himself to search for a heartbeat, and his hand shakes as it clutches onto the green shirt for dear life – _you’re in there, you’re there, you’re there_ -

A wave of melting, all-consuming relief rocks through him in a wave as he realizes Crowley’s eyelids are fluttering open. They weren’t ever fully closed at all. Crowley seems to be looking at him. Or somewhere near him. Either way, Halt feels like he could cry then and there.

Slowly, Crowley’s lips part. They’re dry. He had a habit of chewing down when he was in thought.

“Halt,” he manages, and, although it sounds pitiful and quiet and not like him at all, it sounds like all Halt wants to hear right now.

“We’re alive,” Halt says, and it takes him a second to recognize that his voice is too silent to really be his, too. It’s barely more than whispering. “We’ll be fine.”

Immediately, Crowley’s eyes widen. Halt tries to listen, but the noise he makes isn’t a word. His fingers twitch very slightly.

“Hey, you hear me? You hear me, we’re alive,” Halt tries again, but his voice involuntarily gets stuck in his own throat.

Crowley, however, doesn’t look convinced.

His eyes look straight through Halt for a second, then shift to the side. Very, very deliberately. They’re frantic, and they carry a message he can’t say out loud.

Halt’s stomach drops as Crowley, although unable to summon his voice again, simply mouths, _Behind you_.

Pale freckled hands move, try to reach for Halt – to pull him closer, away from something, away from the threat, but he only makes a second before falling back, eyes floating in sockets. He leaves Halt on his own.

Instinctively, he throws himself away onto his twisted leg, and intuition saves him for what seems like the tenth time today. The man behind him expected him to jump using his good leg, and a club digs into the ground right where Halt would’ve landed had he not changed course.

One protrusion of the club hooks onto Crowley’s limp arm, and, as the club’s dragged back, it leaves another trail of blood, but Crowley’s terrifyingly silent.

It’s _the_ club.

Not a small one, not a slim one, not the one his henchmen used, no, it’s large and it’s bloody and it’s killed before.

The man is Thorgan.

It takes Halt one glance at the large weapon to know he’s, well, he’s more or less fucked. His bow’s away there somewhere, his scabbard is empty and his leg is done for. He can’t fight a giant with a club bare-fisted and with a leg that feels like death itself decided to drag its scythe halfway up forty years early.

The worst in this situation is the view of Crowley on the ground. As Halt pitifully watches the club rise again, a terrifying realization comes to him – Crowley’s chest is still rising, and it nails him down as a convenient target. Just bringing that thing down on unmoving flesh would be so shamefully easy, easy and despicable, _despicable_ , disgusting, but being the absolute scum of the earth was Thorgan’s job.

Indeed, a smile twists his face, nearly cracking it in two. He saw Halt look at Crowley in his panicked thought – he saw an opportunity. Through his arms shines a ray of sunlight as he steps closer to the bush of red hair and the club rises again. _What a pretty morning to die._

Half-clawing, half-crawling toward the man, Halt knows he’s getting there if it’s the last thing he does, and it probably will be – but it doesn’t scare him. It only determines his choice.

And, like a sign from above, the sunlight coats the blade of the knife Halt had dropped as he stumbled to Crowley. Halt prays to any deity that might or might not be listening that Thorgan doesn’t bring the club down soon enough, and the deity listens.

As his fingers wrap around the handle, he has a plan. He always has a plan, even when it’s impossible.

He breathes. The club nearly freezes in midair when he speaks.

Halt had learned some amount of diplomacy throughout his life, some form of persuasion, some sort of coaxing. He throws it all away and speaks so lowly this murderer would understand him – he swears him over and out, he screams curses in all languages he knows and he senses that his Hibernian accent cuts through so hard Thorgan can probably only understand half of it.

But it works. It works, and the man turns to him with an even wider smile.

“Eager to go first, are you?” He taunts. His voice is a low growl, right about the same as they imagined, and Halt scoffs when Thorgan can’t see him. _You’ve got no business sending me off,_ he thinks before losing grasp on any coherent thought. His head starts working without his interference. “Ar’right – let’s see you out, yeah? --You’re lucky I feel like granting wishes today.”

It’s outright condescending, but Halt can’t hear him anymore. He can’t hear anything except his own heartbeat and the whistle of the moving club, and the silent scrape of his nail against the knife.

Then, he doesn’t feel anything when he kicks himself up – he hasn’t got enough energy to stand, but he does have just enough to drive the knife through Thorgan’s stomach as if he was climbing a mountain with only a blade to hook on. And he won’t make the mistake he made before, he vowed it. Before the man can even react, he twists it. Twice, and again, and as much as he can manage, he holds onto it for dear life.

And falls back. No, they both do, Halt on top – and if he didn’t sense the blood flooding down his face, now he does.

The ground is hard, but Halt lands on something different. The limp body doesn’t move anymore, and it never will again, and Halt suddenly feels like he wants to laugh. But he doesn’t, he doesn’t have strength. His hands slowly let go of the knife handle, they just hang by his sides for a minute, utterly useless.

The bandit is dead, Halt thinks, feeling up to his temple and finding nothing but a thick swamp of red. It clouds his vision, and he tries to shake his head, get rid of the fog around him, but it doesn’t work. It’s like his whole head is just as soft and mangled as his leg.

_The bandit is dead, and I might follow soon_.

He doesn’t stand anymore. He can’t. He can only reach out to Crowley, try to check for a heartbeat again, but, before he can properly touch his neck, his legs fail him and he falls sideways, ending up on top of an unmoving redhead, like he’s still covering him up from Thorgan’s club.

He doesn’t manage to tear his eyes open, but he feels it.

Softly, very softly, Crowley breathes out, and in again.

And Halt gives in to the comfortable darkness.

**Author's Note:**

> i do know it was originally 3 men halt fought, but i thought it was a little unfair to just knock crowley down with no kills. also nothing is canon in ra ever so there we go


End file.
